What was the first Microsoft operating system you ever used?

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Might have been windows 93. It's pretty amazing how far computer specs have increased since then...

Nice.

I'm the head IT systems guy for a world-wide publicly traded multinational. (No not Microsoft. My personality would never fit in their corporate culture.) We have thousands of Windows PCs and hundreds of Windows servers. No issues.

Your experiences are based on a sample of 1 I take it?

Computers are only as reliable as the admin is competent. Give a dumbass a computer and it will fail before the week is out, regardless of the OS.

You didnt expect a response to your goat blowjob comment? Really. You eat what you serve.



Not much more than that. Maybe 10-15 machines over the years. Certainly not as many as you.



In this regard we are in agreement. Do we also agree that a dumbass with a linux machine will be in trouble far faster than a dumbass with a windows machine?

Well, I would not advice either Windows or Linux to someone I suspect to be a dumb ass or a nincompoop.

Why not you ask? Because they will be in MY face every other week to fix this or that.

No, I would advice them to buy a Mac and a huge external hdd for Time Machine.

If they still end up buying a Windows PC they will not bother me, but the person who gave them the advice to buy a Windows PC....

If they end up buying a Mac they will only bother me once a year or so, with either some trivial problem or a hardware problem; In either case easy to resolve.

Until now, they have never ended up getting a Linux PC...

These days, I don't look after as much but I used to work in a place with upwards of 1000 PCs (and literally 48 Lotus Domino servers running WinNT).

I'd love to move away from Windows but at the moment it's just not realistic.

Soon though...

Apple is doing a great job at getting people off windows at home.

Does that mean we'd go apple ... no. I just means that we're embracing a wider world.

My theory is that most of what we do will be served by servers and appliances but that the clients (PCs) at work will mostly become terminals again. Not Windows terminals... nope, none of that Citrix or Remote desktop stuff. I'm talking proper WEB 2.0 terminals. Whether we're accessing an internal work web-intranet or an external web site, it will all be connectable and accessible.

When that happens, it won't matter what OS you're running so long as you have a good browser. From then on, it will be anyone's guess... Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome - who cares... regardless, we don't want to have to pay for the OS.

It's not here yet ... but it's coming. (except at home... where PCs are still required to play games.... but things like Quake Wars may change even that perception).

It has its flaws, but it's a good system overall.


I've never edited source code or compiled a custom kernel. Sure, I've edited the odd config file, but nothing too deep in the guts of the system, and any distro I've tried has been at least workable, usually without too much effort (once you know what you're doing). And depending on the hardware you're using, most stuff "just works" nowadays. When I used Windows, I never did manage to find all the drivers for my hardware, and I was quite perturbed by the lack of a centralized system for updating and managing installed software, along with the lack of flexibility.


It's UNIX. It's only "dumbed down" if you don't want to play. Open up a terminal emulator and you have a fully Posix-compliant UNIX system, and there are third-party projects which provide Debian-style package management systems.

I will agree that their UI sucks. OSX probably has one of the worst window management systems around.

My first system was windows 3.11 I think...

I remember that there were LOTS of free games already installed on this, the ones I can think of are:

Chip's challenge, Ski Free, Tripeaks, Jezzball, Klotski, Hangman, Rodent's Revenge etc.

There was one game which I really want to know the name that was part of this free pack but I can't remember the name. It was like a first person space shooter, except the whole background was black, and the stuff you shot at were hollow 3-D polygons. And you had to collect some green polygons or something...

DOS (I don't remember which version.) Before that I used (and continued for a time) a Commodore 64, VIC20, and started with a Timex Sinclair 1000.

I've never really understood the need for a 'hard to use' OS. Having been in tech support for so long, 'dumbed down' works for the rest of the clients. Having supported all levels, I've noted a simple rule: you get computer problems equal or exceeding your level of knowledge...

Ideally, an OS should have a 'dumbed down' level for the plebes, and many hidden features for the hoi polloi among us. Nothing impresses folks like revealing a 'hidden feature'...

I used the very first MS-DOS back in the 80s on the first IBM PCs.

The first MS OS I used would probably be the Windows 2000 beta 3. DOS was just a modified version from somewhere else and wasn't theirs to begin with. Windows 1 to 3.12 and 95 to ME were booting from DOS to run therefore are DOS OSes.

I suppose keeping in with the theme here, I could say Windows 3.1 in an old Acorn

MS DOS

My first computer as a RCA 1802 based COSMAC Elf. Bought the chips and sockets and wire-wrapped the thing together. It was programmed by setting the bit pattern in by toggle switches then pushing the load button to load the byte! It ran at a whooping 1.8 Mhz and had 255 bytes of static ram. I never got the machine running though, but I still have it.
My first store bought (and running) computer was a TRS80 Color Computer. From there was a dos machine 3.X and upgrade through 6.11 it used a non-windows window manager, I'm still using the keyboard from that machine, they don't build them like that anymore. From I eventually "upgraded" that machine to windows 3.10. My next machine came with Dos 6.11 and windows 3.10 and a free "upgrade" voucher to windows95, I was dual-booting slackware linux on it before I upgrade to Win95. After that two linux only machine had SuSE linux, and now I'm dual-booted my dual-core AMD-64 HP between Vista and Arch Linux.

Vista isn't bad to use but I'm much more comfortable in Linux, I'm not happy about how KDE has changed.

It's funny yo see people say "MS-DOS" Whereas MS bought the original DOS, I think it was Q-DOS, made a few modifications and branded it MS-DOS. That's almost like saying your first MS OS was MS-Ubuntu (or similar)
Windows 95/98/ME were built on top of DOS, where DOS was the operating system that Windows ran on.
Windows NT, the first true OS by MS was the first not to be reliant on DOS to boot from

Well, MS did sell Xenix for some time. So there is some unix somewhere down inside. I can still remember that NT was advertised as "better then unix"

The first computer I used was a TRS-80 (think it used some version of DOS...this was back in the days when it had a cassette drive). Then I bought a clearanced floor model Amstrad Word Processor (no idea what OS that used because I didn't have it all that long).

After that, it was DOS 3.1.

Anyone remember "luggable" computers? (The first early portable computers that were so heavy it was like carrying around a microwave oven.)